Black Candle [Paperback]

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1991

poetry, first book by author of ARRANGED MARRIAGES

Editorial Reviews

Review

All In My Head
The Arranged Marriage
At Muktinath
At The Sati Temple, Bikaner
Bengal Night
Boychild
The Brides Come To Yuba City
Burning Bride: 1
Burning Bride: 2
Burning Bride: 3
The Durga Batik
Family Photo In Black And White
The Garba
The Garland
The Gift
Gouri Mashima
The House
I, Manju: 1
I, Manju: 2
In The Hinglaj Desert
Journey
The Living Goddess Speaks
Living Underground: Dacca 1971
The Makers Of Chili Paste
Making Samosas
Mother And Child
My Mother At Maui
My Mother Combs My Hair
My Mother Tells Me A Story
Nargis' Toilette
The Quilt
The Rainflies
The Rat Trap
Restroom
The Robbers' Cave
The Room
Sondra
Song Of The Fisher Wife
Sudha's Story: 1
Sudha's Story: 2
Sudha's Story: 3
Traitor Body
Two Women Outside A Circus, Pushkar
Villagers Visiting Jodhpur Enjoy Iced Sweets
Visit
The Woman Addresses Her Sleeping Lover
Yuba City School
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: CALYX Books; 1st edition (November 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0934971234
• ISBN-13: 978-0934971232
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,879,037 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's acclaimed novels for adults include the bestselling The Mistress of Spices, soon to be a motion picture. Her previous book for young readers, The Conch Bearer, was a Booklist Editors' Choice, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and is a 2005 Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and lives with her husband and two sons in Sugarland, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good thing I joined Amnesty International, March 14, 2000

By 

George Schaefer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Candle (Paperback)

I found these poems to reveal a harsh beauty. If I joke that American women should read this before they complain it would be to ease the tension over severity with which women are treated in many of these Asian cultures. Divakaruni has revealed a piece of her soul and raised concerns over the mistreatment of women in Asia (as well as anywhere in the world for that matter) These poems are best read a couple at a time so one can absorb the passion and the reality of the situations described. A few of the poems in this collection moved me close to tears. Hopefully, a better day will dawn. I would like to apend my earlier comment that American women should read this by stating that all the men need to read it, too.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A supremely impressive collection rich in metaphor., September 4, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Candle, Revised Edition: Poems About Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Hardcover)

Black Candle is a supremely impressive collection of poetry rich with metaphor and set on the Indian sub-continent. These poems portray moving, palpable portraits of women's lives that will strike a universal chord of recognition and appreciation with the western reader. The Room: I have walked this corridor so many times/I no longer notice/the gouged floorboards, the brown light/washing the peeling walls, the stale/childhood smell of curried cabbage.//I am looking for the door,/the one whose striated knob/matches perfectly the lines of my palm,/which opens without sound/into a room with milk-blue walls.//On the sill, a brass bowl/of gardenias in water. Peacocks/spread silk feathers against cushions./The white cockatoo on its stand/knows my name. Sun filters/through the sari of a woman/who rises toward me. I am caught/by the lines of her bones, the fine/lighted hairs on her held-out arm,/your eyes, mother, in her mouthless face.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, provocative and flawed, September 8, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Candle, Revised Edition: Poems About Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Paperback)

Black Candle succeeds in its prose poems that a vignettes of the difficulties of life as a South Asian. The poems also work if one judges them as vignettes rather than poetry. Yoga Lessons is the strongest piece as poetry. Even as vignettes, however, the ubiquous use of first person, which works well for the poems in isolation, fails to work in the collection as the reader gets many "I's" of which some are the same and others not. The book does as excellent job of making the foreign culture and environment accessible to Americans.

This book reminds me most of Jana Harris' work where pioneer women's stories are made into poetry. If you enjoyed that, you'll surely enjoy this,